


a taste for ash

by JaguarCello



Category: Richard II - Shakespeare, The Hollow Crown (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, British Museum, Death of minor character, I apologise, M/M, Museum curator AU, Suicide Attempt (past)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-15
Updated: 2013-07-23
Packaged: 2017-12-20 07:39:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/884701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaguarCello/pseuds/JaguarCello
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Richard Bordeaux, fairly corrupt and dissolute (but in all the fun ways) department leader at the British Museum, finds himself challenged by a group of dissatisfied colleagues. Teasing Henry Bolingbroke is much more fun.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> is anyone even surprised any more

“To be honest,” Richard said, lies curling on his tongue like they were hatched there, “I don’t see what the fuss is about.”

 Arundel snorted in disbelief, and ran his finger down the list of “grievances,” as he’d proclaimed them at the start of the meeting, humming under his breath until he got to the right one. “The fuss?” he repeated, looking round at the men next to him as if anticipating their scoffs of derision.  Henry Bolingbroke, who had once been drunk enough and _pathetic_ enough to consider Richard a friend – almost family, looked down at his bitten fingernails.“The fuss, my dear Mister Bordeaux, is that you have lead this entire department into ruin. And the fact that _Edward_ – “ and he gestured to the corner of the room, where Edward Aumerle and Robert de Vere were sat – “and this… degenerate,”; Robert frowned for a second, then seemed to agree.  Arundel rolled his eyes, and consulted his list once more.

 “These men were made – what farcical title did you create for them? Wiping the cases clean of an incredibly specific cabinet, even though there are people far better qualified to actually care for the collection? Putting bookmarks in the new information leaflets? Pouring you glass upon glass of expensive port and then sucking – “ and in the scraping of chairs that followed, Richard saw Henry shift slightly in his chair. He had, Richard seemed to remember through the haze that clouded his memories of university, tried that a couple of times.

  Gloucester stood up, face reddened behind his greying beard. “None of that sort of language, please. This is all going on record, and we do want history to be kind to us – this is the British Museum, for God’s sake, and most of you are representing other places, Professor.” He looked down at Richard, and a brief flicker of distate crossed his face, before he smoothed it back into the mask he presented most of the time. “Very well,” he called out to the room, voice echoing off the marble floors. “Richard, we’re leaving you as head of the department, mainly because your name is on the leaflets about that exhibition we’re putting on about Chaucer. And you seem to be the only man in the whole of bloody England who can talk about Chaucer without droning, and you did come recommended highly from whatever polytechnic allowed someone with your record in – but. You answer to us now. About everything,” he warned, and Richard rolled his eyes; his blood was boiling, but he couldn't let them see they'd got to him, so he titled his palms to the heavens. 

 “So, you’re curtailing my freedom? Not very cricket, is it? Not very strawberries-and-cream, cut-grass piles on the lawns, scones and tutting, is it? You could have just tutted. I’d have appreciated a tut. But this – this _mutiny_ – “ and the rest of the room refused to look at him, so he stood, because life was only bearable when people were looking at him – “This mutiny, this underhand, grubby little rebellion, is wrong. And I won’t forget this, nor forgive it.” He picked up his bag from beside him, and strode out of the hall.

 People outside – tourists doing peace signs in the bookshop, cleaners sweeping ticket stubs from the Cleopatra exhibition, students muttering in dark corners about who fucked who, and in which orifice – barely turned to look, and so he forced his way through the middle of the throng; they parted like the Red Sea, and a small part of his brain – the part he’d tried to bury when Anne got the diagnosis, the part they’d tried digging to with therapy and electrodes, but given it up as impenetrable – pitied himself. He looked at the crowd, and shuddered slightly; these people were not _him_ , and slipped outside the door to loiter in the shadows by the steps.

 “I rather feel,” he commented to Henry Bolingbroke, who was standing behind him and trying to pretend he wasn’t, “betrayed. This group of idiots – I mean, most of them probably failed whatever meaningless qualification the government has dreamt up now – and actually, that reminds me. Bolingbroke, you’re a monarchist – “

 Henry started to protest, but Richard interrupted him smoothly. “I don’t mean, putting out the bunting and waiting for the next royal to squeeze one out – “

 “Must you be so distasteful?” Henry asked, and Richard was reminded of the face he’d pulled when Richard had kissed him for the first time, but he forced the memory down. University fucks meant nothing in the real world, or so Anne had told him, when he’d drunkenly confessed to everything on their wedding night. He still felt a sort of prickle under his skin when he thought of her – lung cancer, although she had never smoked, because there was no fucking God and there was no heaven, even for her – but it had been a month since he’d woken screaming her name.

 She was one of the few people he’d allowed behind the façade, and she hadn’t liked what she’d seen.

But Henry was still waiting for an answer. “You know me,” and Richard’s voice was lilting, almost caressing, and Henry had to admit that he did.

“Yes, alright – what was your point about the monarchy? Yes, it's my specialist area. Was it, perhaps, something as original that the government don’t recognise the needs of the people? I really don’t see how you can complain, giving that you blew half the photography budget on copying gay porn to stick round the café.” He shrugged, as if embarrassed by this unusually verbose behaviour.  

 Richard reached into his bag, and pulled out a crumpled packet of cigarettes. “Do you mind?” he asked sweetly, even though he knew Henry had always and would always loathe smoking. He also knew that Henry – bound by some ridiculous concept of fairness, of morality and _wanting to be loved_ – would let him smoke.

 “I only started this after Anne,” Richard mused, blowing smoke towards the sky. “I mean, I know feelings aren’t really your thing because you’re so fucking _repressed_ all the time and you will never admit how truly gay you are – “

 “Richard,” hissed Henry, shooting a panicked glance towards a group of schoolchildren on the steps, giggling over the naked statues in the leaflet. “I’ve been married – “

 “And so have I, but we both know that was a marriage of convenience. And so did she, actually, once she walked in on me and some fellow male undergraduate in the marital bed. To be honest, I did love her, and she loved me, even if we didn't fuck all that much. She allowed me to do as I wished, with whom I wished, and we would watch Midsomer Murders together. I think we fucked once without anybody else there, maybe, out of curiosity. It did it for me, to be honest – most things do it for me, though, but she didn't want me to pretend she had a cock, or something. Sometimes, I feel bad.” He sighed, and flicked ash expertly to the ground.

 “I loved my wife,” Henry said from between clenched teeth. “Don’t you dare mention her name, because if I can’t then you shouldn’t get to. And I know how messed up you were when Anne died, I was the one that found you in the fucking bathtub. You don’t get to pretend you didn’t care, not when I saw the colour of that bathwater – “

 “Sure you weren’t just trying to check me out?” Richard asked, but his smirk was gone, and he closed two long fingers around his left wrist, and Henry closed his eyes for a second.  Richard went on.

 “I’ve had many conversations about this with my therapist, actually. The whole burning the house down, the self-destruction – there are copious notes. I don’t think, somehow, some former second-rate friend and now second-rate history professor gets to comment on my mental health,” and Richard smiled at him, disarmingly sweetly.

 “You’re impossible,” stated Henry flatly, rubbing a hand across his chin in frustration.

 “I know,” Richard replied, because normal people were possible and he was anything but normal,  and he beamed as brightly as he had done so on antidepressants, and sent the cigarette butt spinning to the ground.

 The smoke was still swirling up from it when the doors slammed behind him, but Henry wasn’t watching it.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Richard is reminiscing - a dangerous game, when you've lead such a life.

When Richard and Edward had fucked for the first time, in his office with Edward’s shirt thrown over the lone security camera high up on the wall, on his desk with pens clattering to the floor, Richard had been cruel. “Of course,” he’d told himself as he buttoned up Edward’s shirt for him, drawing nails across the hollow of his collarbones and dipping his thumbs into the bruises from his mouth, until Edward gasped – “You’re only doing this to get over Anne,” because she’d been dead a month and the house still stank of lilies, and her clothes still swamped the wardrobe and the air was still perfumed with antiseptic. He’d told Edward as much, and Edward had just shrugged. He was, Richard thought, a bizarre mixture of Eton-bred and dukedom-inheriting arrogance, and the awkwardness of a colt, or maybe a deer. He’d bolt, too, if Richard got too far under his skin, but then the hooks were in.

 “You’re bad for me,” he’d managed to gasp out to Richard once, when he was being sucked off behind one of the boards about Pompeii five minutes before closing, and Richard had stopped to consider it, but then looked up, eyes wide and smile faintly mocking – in the way he’d practiced in the mirror a thousand times – and Edward had just rolled his eyes, and then had screwed them shut and gasped out Richard’s name so loudly that an old lady peered round the board.

 That had been a fun one to explain to the chair of governors, and perhaps explained the frostiness of the welcome he got at work the next day. Edward had sat down next to him when he was on his smoke break, and muttered out of the corner of his mouth that “I can’t  - see you, fuck you – anymore. It’s, well. I suppose it is personal, really,” and Richard’s sandwich had tasted funny, so he’d chucked it in favour of using his entrance key to rack up lines on the bench.  Again, the chair of governors was not impressed, but he seduced Henry Bolingbroke into putting in a good word.

  Almost nobody there liked him, he knew, and the thing he found hilarious (and he’d laughed about it before, when Anne was coughing and wheezing and he’d got a phone call ordering him into work, but he couldn’t laugh at it now) was that he was supposed to act like it bothered him, not being told about social events in dingy pubs full of Tories, not having to attend parties with beautiful women and balding men.

 He was a little drunk, a little maudlin, and the lights were being turned out one by one in the museum. Home, he knew, would be empty, and the hallway would be dark, and so he’d taken to keeping a sleeping bag tucked under his desk. He’d told himself it was for warmth – the heating budget was notoriously tight, “not that we don’t have enough to deal with, when fucking Bordeaux is wasting it all on cocaine and interns that are probably _rent boys_ ”, he’d been informed via email.

 “Burning the midnight oil, I see?” and he didn’t have to turn to recognise the carefully constructed accent, the cautiously-expressed vowels, as if Bolingbroke were teasing at a scab, unwilling to rip it and expose his old self, but loathe to let the new self form – and he was drunker than he thought, because he looked towards the doorway and nodded. Bolingbroke loped in, carrying his own Scotch, and set it on the table.

 “Bolingbroke,” he remembered to say, words rolling around his tongue like marbles. “I’m just reading about my grandfather– oh, pull up a chair,” and Bolingbroke frowned slightly at the magnanimity of this, but did so.

 “Your grandfather,” he said, and then looked shrewdly at Richard. “You’re pissed too, what are you really doing?” and Richard snorted at that.

 “Oh, just reminiscing, you know. The good old days. When Edward sucked me off under this desk when I was doing a video conference. And, university, when we both simultaneously caused the other to have a panic over sexuality. I thought I had _taste_ , you see – “

 “I thought you came out of the womb a flaming homosexual, didn’t you say that to me once? Although we were very drunk and you’d been doing that cookery course because Anne wanted crème brûlée not from a supermarket – “ he reached out for the bottle, and poured some into a dusty glass (not Richard’s, so he must have  had his own), and Richard made himself look away from the cream of his throat. He winced at the burn, and went on. “And then because you’d been drinking the wine for the coq au vin, you made some horrific pun about flambéing and everyone was embarrassed – “

 “I don’t remember that,” Richard said, and knew Henry was looking at his lips. “I don’t really remember much about university, other than that we studied in some of the most beautiful buildings in England, and threw up in most of them. Obviously, I met Anne, and you met – “ he licked his lips, and Henry stared at his throat, blushing – from what Richard could make out in the dim light from the desk-lamp – “you met your wife. And then we got married.” He paused, and took another sip. It burned less this time, so he took another.

 Henry kept silent, so Richard twisted the cup in his hands and carried on.

 “I’m not sure, really, why we did. My father wanted me to inherit whatever influence he could bequeath on me, according to his will, but since I was ten when I inherited it I rather seem to have fallen from favour.” He twisted slightly on the chair. “I’m pissed,” he added solemnly.

 “I married for love. I’m capable of love, you know. I wonder what it must be like for you, stuck in that ten-year-old’s attitude to love, to sex. Don’t think I don’t know that you use it as a weapon,” and he leaned forwards on his chair slightly, until his knees were brushing up against Richard’s.

 “Henry – and when did I start calling you Henry? We loathe each other when we’re not, you know – “  but Henry leaned forwards and kissed him with the same old fierceness, and Richard forgot to give a damn that the kiss would be broadcasted to every security officer in the building, because Henry still kissed in the same, rather hesitant way, as if expecting to be pushed away.

 So Richard curled his fingers around Henry’s neck and kissed back, and by the time the (admittedly grainy) images were emailed round the college by some guard with a trigger-happy print-screen finger, the sleeping bag had come into its own.

 “Don’t call me,” Henry had told him, as Richard kissed, almost too hard, his neck.

 “Don’t answer then,” Richard had replied, and twisted a nipple so forcefully that Henry cried out.

  Richard didn’t call, but Henry might have answered.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> shut Up don't look at me


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Retribution is a subjective thing indeed

“Mr. Bordeaux,” drawled Arundel the next morning, and smirking at him, “Do you remember the conversations – and they are plural, because I have a log of them – about the CCTV cameras? And that bright idea we had to stop you living in your office, which was namely, stopping your card-key from working after 6pm? Because, well, we’ve decided to implement it. Go and do some marking, and for God's sake have a shower. You're a professor - proof that God has a sense of humour, at least.” He held a hand out for the key, and Richard scowled, the ghosts of the last drinks from last night howling inside his head, and thoughts full of the timely blackout that had prevented him from dialling Bolinbroke’s extension.

He handed over the key, though, and Arundel held it up to the light of the vaulted ceiling, as if checking it were a forgery. “Never can be too sure with you, can we?” and he turned the corner, and Richard sidled into his office. The door remained open without his key to shut it, however, and the cleaners hadn’t bothered to tidy up in there, so he shrugged and went to the gift-shop instead.

 Edward was behind the counter, stapling a sheet of paper over and over and gift-wrapping a pencil.

 “Aumerle, is that really a good use of the museum’s money? For your mindless entertainment?” but he’d forgotten the usual acid in his tone – probably vomited out that morning along with everything else that defined his personality – and Richard barely looked at him, but stayed staring down at his hands.

 “We need a new one, and we can’t get a new one until all these are used up. And Arundel hasn’t forgotten the whole technical-breach-of-conduct shit, so I’d advise you – “

 Richard leaned across the desk, seized his lapels in both hands, and half-dragged him to his feet. “Oh, you’d advise me? How lovely. I much preferred your mouth when it was doing other things – “

 “I’m pretty sure that’s sexual harassment, you know. And I know you tried to tell yourself that the whole thing between me and you meant nothing, and it was all to get over your wife, but it was a power thing, wasn’t it? Like, the whole “say my name” stuff, and –well.  You pushed and pushed until I was falling in love with you, you fucking bastard, and then you can come and pick a fight just because you’re hungover and lonely?” His face was flushed slightly, and Richard could feel his heart racing below the expensive fabric of the shirt.

 “It’s nothing to do with you,” he muttered, letting go of Edward’s collar. “And it’s not my fault that you’re pathetic. And stop sending me drunk messages rambling about pederasty, because there are only a few years between us and you’re twenty-eight, you can grow a beard, and you’re not a fucking teenager. So you’re wrong – what is your degree in, anyway? Give me some credit. I don’t even fuck the undergraduates I teach, mostly. And I’m sure your father wouldn’t approve. One last thing,” he shot over his shoulder, “the grammar on that sign’s wrong,” He turned to go.

 “Did you forget about Henry’s son?” Richard twisted round, almost knocking over a stand of postcards about Pompeii. Edward smiled slightly, and went on. “He’s away at school, apparently. Quite the troublemaker, or so I’ve heard. Hangs about with some boy called Poins, and they terrorise everyone they ever meet. I wonder what he’d say about this - well. Not exactly appropriate relationship between you and his father, especially with his mother dead. But then – you never had any children, so I don’t suppose it would matter to you.” He paused to draw breath, and then half-whispered. “Nobody else matters to you, apart from yourself.”

 “I have to drag a load of history students from some pretentious private school round Classics now, even though I don't give a fuck and it's probably your job. So thanks for your concern, Edward, but I must dash,” and although he didn’t look back, he knew Edward was watching him.

The pretentious history students were vile, and reminded Richard far too much of himself at that age.

“You know,” he said to the one with the most braying laugh, “that you are never as great as you think you are? Hubris will bring you crashing down, you know. You will fall into the pool, you will fall from the Pegasus, your portrait will wither behind gilded curtains.” The boy looked round at his friends, as if summoning a laugh with a look, and they duly obeyed. Richard frowned at them. “No, seriously. It will happen to you, and it’s only not happened to me because I’m better than you.” There was a slightly stunned silence, and he realised that he had perhaps overdone his brief slightly.

 “Sorry, I might still be drunk,” he added, but the group had sloped off to the gift shop. He resisted the urge to follow them, just to annoy Edward, but decided to retrieve his key-card.

 He couldn’t find Arundel, but found the card on his desk, with a note.

 “Found this. Also, how about you don’t call my mobile number, this time?”

 He got drunk that night, cocooned in the room that Anne had died in, having given up on marking things – “But you’re a professor,” the students would say, but he couldn’t bring himself to care because the night was pressing in on his mind – and left a message. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> no comment


End file.
